Baby's parents find a Water Balz ball isn't a ball for their child

There's a Northeast Ohio connection to this scary story from Reuters Health about a baby who needed surgery to removing a large gel ball blocking her intestines.

The colored ball the 8-month-old girl ingested is marketed under the brand name Water Balz by DuneCraft Products of Chagrin Falls. The balls “are small to begin with, but can grow to the size of a racquetball when placed in water,” according to Reuters.

For orally fixated toddlers, that can be a problem, according to Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye, a pediatric surgeon at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, where the child was treated.

"It goes in small and grows on the inside and may not come out," he tells Reuters Health.

The child's parents “suspected she had eaten one of her sister's Water Balz, and their concerns grew when they read on the label that the balls expand up to 400 times if placed in water,” according to the story. X-rays showed her small intestine was distended; the blockage grew quickly over 48 hours.

When the baby went to the operating room, doctors “cut her intestine open and drew from it a bright-green Water Balz nearly an inch and a half across,” Reuters Health reports. Fortunately, the girl recovered and now is doing fine, according to the story.

DuneCraft CEO Grant Cleveland tells the news service he was sorry to learn of the incident.

He “noted that the Water Balz product already carries warnings on the label and is recommended for kids over 3,” according to the story.

"An eight-month-old has no business being near that product," he told Reuters Health. "Trying to turn it in to a public risk is absurd."

If you don't remember Mr. Cleveland, who was a high-profile young software entrepreneur in town before launching DuneCraft, check out this profile from August 2006.

Web of influence

Columbus Business Firstreports that a state-run website is helping businesses automate buy-Ohio searches for vendors and suppliers.

The site, Check Ohio First, “launched quietly a year ago by the Ohio Department of Development's Small Business Development Center, (and) has grown to 460 business users, mostly small employers,” according to the newspaper.

Only Ohio-based companies can create profiles as suppliers in the online matchmaker, but there are no geographic restrictions on buyers searching the site, Columbus Business First notes.

Halcyon Solutions Inc. of Dublin, Ohio, won the bid for the $50,000 contract to develop the site and a two-year, $100,000 deal to host it.

The effort was a long time in coming. The newspaper notes that former Gov. Ted Strickland in 2008 proposed creating an electronic vendor matchmaking tool.

Be part of the (online) community

Facebook and Twitter now account for more than half of website traffic for small businesses — considerably more than they impact large companies, a new study finds.

SmallBizTrends.com reports that the study by Northwestern University professor Rich Gordon and Syndio Social CEO Zachary Johnson “sought to understand how sites, large and small, are connected on the web.” To get their answer, “they examined links between more than 300 Chicago-based sites and looked at analytics data and referral sources for 100 of them.”

The study found that small companies derive 48.1% of their web traffic from Facebook and 3.6% from Twitter, for a total of 51.7%. Midsize business, meanwhile, get 25.6% of their web traffic from Facebook and 5.4% from Twitter, and large companies get just 14.5% from Facebook and 4.2% from Twitter.

That all makes sense, given that the larger the company, the larger the marketing budget to reach web users more directly.

But as the story notes, “the takeaways here for small business owners are clear: share local content, emphasize social media (and) send traffic and links to others in your online community.”